Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Stalk or stay put?
During a final cull outing, a roe doe and her yearling are perfect candidates, but they present the stalker with a difficult dilemma
The wood was dark and still as I crept along the ride. Only the occasional hooting of a tawny owl broke the silence as I made my way between two thickets of young oak trees to the high seat beyond. It was the last weekend in March and this would be the final opportunity to make a significant contribution to the cull numbers, so I had already dropped off George, Luke and Ronnie, and directed them to their high seats. In a normal year I would have had anything up to 10 Rifles out for our group cull, but in view of COVID-19 restrictions on travelling and overnight stays, that had simply not been possible. However, even with only four of us out, I was pretty confident that at least someone should score.
Checking the woods carefully with the thermal-imaging binoculars as I walked, I could see nothing in the undergrowth beside me and eventually my high seat came into view. I had selected for myself a big free-standing seat situated on the crossroads of two rides. It is a good
position and affords lots of visibility — on my left the oak thickets that I had walked through, behind me a grassy ride leading to a gate into the park, and to my front right-hand side a couple of acres of newly planted ground, surrounded by a rabbit fence. So, having got myself settled, it was that open ground which I first checked out.
White shapes
It was still far too dark to see, much less to shoot. But with the thermal imager I got an excellent picture of the woods around me and, flickering through the trees on the far side of the rabbit fence, I could see two white shapes. Deer certainly. Too big for muntjac and too small for fallow. I centred them in the rangefinder — just a tad under 200, but even at a distance I could see the slender body shape and sleek ears. Probably not Chinese either, then. Roe perhaps?
In those magical minutes between night and morning, the woods were starting to wake up to the early grey glimmers of dawn. A cock blackbird was singing his first hesitant notes and soon others would join in. From somewhere a woodpigeon started cooing and from the top branches of a bare ash tree a mistle thrush added its churring rattle. The light was coming up, and those two deer were still there, hanging around in some rough ground beyond the rabbit fence. There was the ghost of a breeze, but it was in my favour and I knew that if I was going to try to get closer to them, I had to make a decision soon about whether to set off on foot.
I dismounted and, under cover of the early morning gloom, I stalked quite quickly to the end of the rabbit fence, dropped to my knees and crawled the last few yards through a bit of rough cover, then raised the Swarovskis. Roe: two of them. It lookedlike an adult doe and her yearling daughter, both of them very much on the menu.
Belly crawl
If I could make another 20 yards or so across the open ground, I might be able to get a lean off one of the fence posts, so I commenced a belly crawl. I got to the nearest fence post just in time to see the two deer, still quite unconcerned, wander around the far corner of the fence line and disappear into the trees beyond.
Should I attempt to follow them, or should I get back to my high seat in the hope that something better might turn up? It was perhaps 40 minutes off sunrise, and other would be out
there and on the move. I headed back to my position.
Late March is perhaps a little too early in the season to enjoy the full richness of the dawn chorus, but it is still a glorious time to be out in the woods, and above the sound of birdsong a greater spotted woodpecker was drumming away on a dead oak bough. With primroses and violets bright on the edges of the rides and pussy willow catkins hanging above them, there was a feeling that spring was at last about to banish what has been a difficult winter for so many of us.
Flushed scarlet and gold, the eastern horizon heralded an imminent sunrise as I scanned behind me and finally caught a movement in the wood. Changing from the Pulsar to the Swarovskis, I could see a roe, moving stealthily through the trees towards the ride behind me. What was it: buck or doe? As it emerged from behind a hazel coppice stool I could see that it was the latter.
My high seat is plenty big enough for me to turn to take a shot so, in the space of a few moments, I had dismounted and turned in order to get a lean off the backrest. The doe was now just inside the wood, with a deep ditch in front of her and beyond it an open grassy ride over which I had a perfect view. Pondering whether to jump the ditch, she paused for perhaps a second. There was no need to wait for her to emerge on to the ride: her pause was quite long enough for me to settle on her chest and squeeze off a round.
Rattling and rustling
Through the scope I saw her lunge forward towards the ditch, then turn and run back into the wood, and in a moment or two she had vanished. All was still once more, though I fancied that I could hear a rattling and a rustling in the undergrowth. Was she kicking her last as she expired? I guessed so.
But then, moments later, another roe appeared in almost the same place, this time moving more quickly. A yearling doe, which did not pause inside the wood but jumped the ditch straight out on to the grassy ride where, as she hesitated for a moment, I had her plumb at 60 yards. At my shot she staggered and ran for the park gate, leaking blood into the ruts and puddles as she did so, before collapsing at the foot of the gatepost.
An adult doe and her yearling daughter: these were clearly the same two deer that I had seen earlier that morning, and I offered a little prayer to the hunting gods that I had not hurried off in fruitless pursuit after they had departed but had instead gone back to my high seat to await their return. There had been no need to stalk them for they had, albeit unwittingly, stalked me.
The adult doe was found quickly, just a few yards back in the wood where she had gone down to a heart shot. It was an hour after sunrise and time to catch up with the rest of the team. I checked our group cull Whatsapp for messages and it seemed that, while George and Ronnie had blanked, Luke had shot a Chinese doe.
So, hooking the adult roe under the chin with the Jägerschmid dragging hook that I keep in the right-hand pocket of my stalking jacket, and hocking the yearling, I started the long drag back to our rendezvous point where we gralloched all three animals in the morning sunshine and stowed them in the back of the Land Rover.
It had been a good start to our weekend, with three more deer in the bag to add to the two roe, two muntjac and a Chinese that we had shot the previous evening. By Sunday night, the four of us would have 20 deer in the larder, as many as I might normally hope to shoot with my regular gang of Rifles.
“There had been no need to stalk them for they had, albeit unwittingly, stalked me”